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Chapter 5: The Innate Truth

I was staying in my village and Mulla Nasruddin came to visit me. He, in those days, used to live in New Delhi, the capital, and he was so full of the capital that he was almost blind. I took him to the small fort of my village; he said, “What! You call this a fort? You should come to New Delhi and see the Red Fort. This is nothing!” I took him to the river, and he says, “What! You call this a river? I have never seen such a sick and thin river in my life.” And this happened everywhere.

Then came the full-moon night, and I thought that at least with the full moon he will be happy and he will not bring in this small village. But no, I was wrong. I took him to the river. It was a beautiful silent evening, and then the moon came up, very big, simply wonderful. And I looked at Nasruddin and said, “Look! What a big moon.”

He looked at the moon, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Not bad for a small village like this.”

This is the mind; it persists, it comes in spirals - again and again to the same thing. You can renounce the world, but you will not become otherworldly; you will remain very worldly. And if you want to check, go to the Indian monks, sadhus. They remain very, very worldly, rooted in the world. They have renounced everything, but their focus is on the world, their focus is on renouncing, their focus is ego-centered, ego-oriented. They may be thinking that by renouncing they are nearing God, no! Nobody has ever reached to the divine by saying no to anything.

This is the vision of Tantra. Tantra says say yes, say yes to everything. You need not fight, you need not even swim - you simply float with the current. The river is going by itself, on its own accord, everything reaches to the ultimate ocean. You simply don’t create any disturbance, you don’t push the river; you simply go with it. That going with it, floating with it, relaxing with it, is Tantra.

If you can say yes, a deep acceptance happens to you. If you say yes, how can you be complaining? How can you be miserable? Then everything is as it should be. You are not fighting, not denying - you accept. And remember, this acceptance is different from ordinary acceptance.

Ordinarily a person accepts a situation when he feels helpless; that is impotent acceptance. That will not lead you anywhere; impotence cannot lead you anywhere. A person accepts a situation when he feels hopeless: “Nothing can be done, so what to do? At least accept, to save face.” Tantra acceptance is not that type of acceptance. It comes out of an over-fulfillment, it comes out of a deep contentment - not out of hopelessness, frustration, helplessness. It comes when you don’t say no; it suddenly surfaces in you. Your whole being becomes a deep contentment.

That acceptance has a beauty of its own. It is not forced; you have not practiced for it. If you practice, it will be false; it will be hypocrisy. If you practice, you will be split in two: on the outside it will be acceptance; deep down, the turmoil, the negation, the denial. Deep down you will be boiling up to explode any moment. Just on the surface you will pretend that everything is okay.